Dear HOT Community, This has been a tough couple of weeks for many of us. Some in our HOT community have been affected by sickness of a friend or family member. Almost all of us have been affected by restrictions in movement, additional family or child care responsibilities, or loss of a job or livelihood.
I have been busy working with our managers to ensure our staff are safe, healthy and can continue working remotely where possible. HOT's staff team https://www.hotosm.org/staff/ is spread across 19 countries, so this has taken quite some effort, rapid analysis, and policy changes. Most HOT staff including in country offices are now working remotely. This has only been possible because of the flexibility of our staff, in particular Global Operations Manager, Rachel VanNice, and Programs Director Paul Uithol. In addition, our donors have been working with us to adjust project timelines. Thankfully, we do not expect any COVID-19 related reductions to staff positions at this time. All the while, the HOT community has been identifying ways to best support the response. So many community members have emailed to offer support and help during these difficult times. We've published some thoughts on ways to do that on our COVID-19 page: https://www.hotosm.org/projects/hot-covid-19-response/ There are now COVID-19 mapping tasks on the HOT Tasking Manager in support of response efforts in Colombia and Peru: https://tasks.hotosm.org/ These projects are a great way to start - and we are actively seeking other data needs at the national or local level where our global community can help (please get in touch if you are aware of requests from a local response effort). We are actively raising funds for emergency microgrants from individuals and corporate partners. We hope to be able to get funds to communities who need it to address COVID-19 related challenges locally. The HOT community has always come together in times of crisis, so let's use this as another opportunity to do just that. Take good care, Tyler *Tyler Radford* Executive Director [email protected] @TylerSRadford *Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team* *Using OpenStreetMap for Humanitarian Response & Economic Development* web <http://hotosm.org/> | twitter <https://twitter.com/hotosm> | facebook <https://www.facebook.com/hotosm> | donate <https://hotosm.org/donate>
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